Book Image

Android System Programming

By : Roger Ye, Shen Liu
Book Image

Android System Programming

By: Roger Ye, Shen Liu

Overview of this book

Android system programming involves both hardware and software knowledge to work on system level programming. The developers need to use various techniques to debug the different components in the target devices. With all the challenges, you usually have a deep learning curve to master relevant knowledge in this area. This book will not only give you the key knowledge you need to understand Android system programming, but will also prepare you as you get hands-on with projects and gain debugging skills that you can use in your future projects. You will start by exploring the basic setup of AOSP, and building and testing an emulator image. In the first project, you will learn how to customize and extend the Android emulator. Then you’ll move on to the real challenge—building your own Android system on VirtualBox. You’ll see how to debug the init process, resolve the bootloader issue, and enable various hardware interfaces. When you have a complete system, you will learn how to patch and upgrade it through recovery. Throughout the book, you will get to know useful tips on how to integrate and reuse existing open source projects such as LineageOS (CyanogenMod), Android-x86, Xposed, and GApps in your own system.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Analyzing recovery

Before we start to build recovery for our x86vbox device, we will analyze the code flow of recovery to understand how it works. There are two ways to enter recovery mode from the end user perspective. When users want to perform a factory reset or an OTA update is available, the main system can write a recovery command to the bootloader control block (BCB) and cache partition before resetting the system.

The second way to enter recovery mode is to use a key combination manually. After turning off the phone, press a key combination at the same time to enter the recovery mode manually. The key combination is defined by the device manufacturing, for example, it can be a combination of volume down and power buttons.

In both cases, entering the recovery mode is closely related to the implementation of bootloader. The Android system, recovery, and bootloader communicate with each other using two interfaces...